Julie and Romeo Get Lucky

by Jeanne Ray

  “That’s good,” Romeo said, trying to be encouraging. “The pink bouquets look nice.”

  “They look like springtime.” Raymond took the camera back and peered into the little screen. “Springtime in October. Not bad.”

  I leaned in to take a look. I wasn’t at the stores any more than Romeo was, and I was anxious to get any little visual clue of what was going on. “How are the mums moving?”

  Raymond scrolled quickly through his pictures and showed me a sea of potted mums near the front door of Roseman’s. He had clumped all the colors, whites with the whites, pinks with pinks, yellows with yellows, then pressed all the clumps in close together, raising some up on bricks to change the height. It looked like a float, like a massive flower arrangement on the floor.

  “Raymond, that’s beautiful.” I was genuinely moved.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, showing me another shot taken from outside so I could see how nicely the mums showed from the sidewalk. “We’ve got everything under control.”

  Alan, who lived at Romeo’s and also worked in the stores, brought over his three children, Tommy, Patsy, and Babe. He told them they were not to bounce on the bed. They moved around Romeo very carefully, touching his nose, kissing his wrists.

  “Does it hurt very much?” Tommy asked.

  “Not much,” Romeo said. “It only hurts when I yawn.”

  “Junior ate the Halloween pumpkin,” Babe said. She was a dreamy little girl of five with straight black hair cut into a pixie. “And it isn’t even Halloween yet.”

  “We’ll get you a new pumpkin,” I told her.

  Patsy eyed me with sudden suspicion. “Where’s your room?” she asked, as if she had just done the math in her head.

  “I take naps on the couch,” I said. “I don’t need a whole lot of sleep.”

  Pretty soon they all wandered back down to the living room to see Sarah, who had suggested it would be very nice if they all watched Willie Wonka together since they were practically cousins or something. When I went downstairs later I found the three little Cacciamanis lined up in a neat row in front of the television with my granddaughter.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked.

  Tommy unglued himself from the story long enough to speak a sentence. “He said we could stay and spend some time with Grandpa.”

  And so I inherited three more children for dinner.

  It wasn’t as if all of Romeo’s boys were around. His son Nicky was in the Air Force and still stationed in Germany, so he didn’t come by at all. But Big Tony made up for his absence by being around all the time. All of his latent desires to be a doctor unleashed themselves on Romeo. He was forever checking his father’s pulse and looking into his eyes. “Enough with the penlight,” Romeo said gently.

  Tony read up on compression fractures on the Internet, and after the first week he put together a series of exercises that involved lifting Romeo’s legs up and down to keep him from getting blood clots. Tony could be overly zealous, but he was unquestionably helpful when it came time to bathe and dress Romeo, and he did a lot of the cajoling it took to get Romeo on his feet for a minute or so every now and then as Dominic suggested. I didn’t like to be the one to drag Romeo out of bed. The screwed-up look of pain on his face broke my heart.

  The other son was Joe, the oldest, and whenever he came by I made myself especially busy in the kitchen. I had never quite forgotten the singular intensity with which he had tried to break Romeo and me apart during our early courtship, and while he was completely polite to me now, I remained secretly wary. Joe ran a trucking company, and everything about him was trucklike: He was big and solid and deliberate. I could swear I caught a slight hint of diesel in the wake of air he left behind him.

  On the tenth day of Romeo’s internment in my bedroom the doorbell rang—an unusual sound, as most of the visitors came so regularly they had taken to letting themselves in. I was upstairs folding laundry on the foot of the bed and talking to Romeo, who had just woken up from a long pain-pill nap, about whether or not we should wait until Thanksgiving to set up our Christmas displays, when all the other stores were already stringing up lights at Halloween. I heard Sarah yelling at Tony that she would get the door, but she sounded a little halfhearted. Doorbells were not nearly so interesting now that so many people came over all the time.

  “Hi, Mr. Cacciamani. Hi, Mrs. Cacciamani.”

  “Hi there, Sarah,” I heard Joe say. “Is my father upstairs?”

  “Sounds like you’ve got company,” I said to Romeo.

  “It’s about time someone came to see me,” he said tiredly.

  “He doesn’t go anywhere,” Sarah said from downstairs.

  I was glad that Joe had brought his wife. I thought she lent a nice counterbalance to her husband’s essential thuggishness. Nancy taught math at a Catholic school on the other side of Somerville, and so her schedule didn’t tend to be very flexible. I wondered if today was some obscure Catholic holiday I didn’t know about, the Blessed Holy Feast Day of Saint Somebody. The calendar was teeming with them, and it seemed to me the Catholic schools were closed as many days as they were open.

  I smoothed the covers over Romeo and ran my hand quickly over his hair.

  “Straightening me up?” he asked.

  “I want them to think I take good care of you.” It was my intention to say a very short hello, then slip back down to the kitchen, telling myself I was being thoughtful by letting the family have a little time alone together. Maybe Nancy would want to come downstairs with me and drink coffee. I could ask her whether or not she thought Sarah needed a math tutor.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Up you go.”

  “Why is he upstairs?” a shrill voice demanded. “Who put him upstairs?”

  I looked at Romeo, who had gained enough mobility by this point to turn his head and look at me. I mouthed the word, “Who?” and he mouthed back to me, “My mother.” He was pale, or perhaps he was just reflecting my own paleness back at me.

  Thump, thump came the heavy footsteps, the slow and deliberate encroaching of doom. It was like a horror film. I was trapped in the bedroom, and something truly wicked was coming up the stairs. I opened the door a tiny crack and peered out with one eye. There they were, huffing and puffing up to the second floor in a pose that was not entirely unfamiliar to me: the scariest son carting the scariest mother up and up in his arms. Joe was much bigger than Romeo, and the old witch Cacciamani was, I am sorry to say, much smaller than me, and still I could see him struggling. His receding hairline was crowned in stars of sweat, and I thought I heard some wheezing.

  What if he went down, too? What if I had to lay another Cacciamani in my bed and nurse them both back to health, while the old woman harped me to death? I felt a cold chill and shut the door.

  Thump, thump. They came closer. There wasn’t time to ask the logical questions: What could Joe possibly be thinking of bringing her over here without calling first? Or, Do you think she knows where she is? There was only time for one question, the big question, and I whispered, “What are we going to do?”

  “Hide,” he said.

  Without giving it a single thought, I stepped into my closet.

  This was not a walk-in closet: This was a good, honest closet built for the good, honest sensibilities of the 1920s, when every man had three suits and every woman had four dresses and they could all be hung together without actually touching in a very small space. Whenever I opened my closet, I was confronted by the massive amount of superfluous junk that was crammed into it. My closet was a no-man’s-land, a collection of things I had once needed and loved and had completely forgotten, horrible muumuus and corduroy jeans crammed in beside a couple of lovely cashmere sweaters. I stepped into a pool of my own shoes, bent down and shoved my shoulder into the densely packed wall of fabric, and pulled the door shut behind me. Had I stopped to give the whole situation two seconds of consideration, I would have been too late.

  From inside my closet I heard the bedroo
m door swing open, somehow missing the knock that surely must have preceded an adult man bringing his grandmother over to see his father in his father’s girlfriend’s bedroom.

  “Surprise!” Joe said in a weary voice.

  “Put me down!”

  “Hi, Ma,” Romeo said.

  “This is some hospital. Look at the junk that’s lying around here.”

  “It isn’t a hospital, Ma.”

  “I should say not. The nurses don’t do anything for you. The one who let us in wouldn’t even tell us your room number.”

  That’s because she’s eight years old, you idiot.

  “Grammy, Dad’s not in the hospital.”

  It was very snug inside my closet and very dark except for the small strip of light that came in from beneath the door. I was crouching on a pair of winter boots that were not altogether comfortable, but I was not unhappy in there. I realized I had probably never taken absolutely everything out of my closet and cleaned it, and as a result there was a certain amount of dust to contend with, but what did that matter? It was my stuff after all, and the smells were my smells, my perfume and my cedar blocks and the faint green odor of the flower shop that permeated my life.

  And while many a woman might have been offended to have been asked to hide at the age of sixty-three in her own house, I was not. I felt saved from an impossible situation. Old woman Cacciamani might not be able to tell a bedroom from an intensive care unit, but I have no doubt she would have recognized me, and she would have wanted to know what in the hell Julie Roseman was doing in Romeo’s hospital room.

  “Why are you lying in bed?” she snapped. “I’ve already had lunch.”

  “I hurt my back,” Romeo said patiently.

  “Don’t you remember, I told you about Dad’s back. You’ve been asking where he was, so I brought you over here to see him.” Joe’s voice sounded huge and gruff, even when it was clear he was trying to speak gently to his grandmother. “See him? He’s right there.”

  “Of course I see him. Do you think I’m blind? There’s a cat on the floor. Even in Italy they didn’t let cats into the hospital. It’s not clean.”

  “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,” Joe said sweetly.

  Oompah-Loompah meowed. “He went under the bed,” the old woman said. “Disgusting.”

  “Everybody knows you’ve got good eyes, Ma,” Romeo said, valiantly trying to change the subject. “Now tell me, are you being nice to Theresa?”

  The saint, I thought at the very mention of her name. The one who stays home taking care of her children and her dog and her vicious ninety-three-year-old grandmother-in-law. I never understood the concept of Catholic sainthood until I met Theresa.

  “That girl steals.”

  “Theresa doesn’t steal, Ma.”

  “She takes my things. She takes my shoes.”

  “She picks things up,” Romeo said. “She cleans up your room. If you want to know where something is, just ask her. She’ll tell you.”

  I shifted my hips a quarter inch to the left, hoping to relieve the growing numbness in my legs, and in doing so must have stirred up some dust. And so I did what I always do in the face of dust: I sneezed. There wasn’t any time to stifle it. It was an ambush sneeze.

  “What was that?” the old woman said. A mind like a sieve but ears as sharp as a five-year-old’s.

  “Yeah, what was that?” Joe said curiously.

  “Another patient,” Romeo said calmly. “He’s in the next room. Sneezes all day long.”

  “I want you out of here,” Mother Cacciamani said. “The place is a pigsty. Look at this, leaving piles of laundry right here on your bed. How do you know if it’s even clean? The germs in this place will kill you, and cats can smother you in your sleep. Whatever you’ve got now, it can’t be as bad as what you could catch here.”

  “I’ll come home as soon as I can,” Romeo said.

  “You can tell Joe to take you home with us.” I imagined she pointed up to the big man, thinking he could carry her to the car in one arm and take Romeo down in the other.

  “No,” Romeo said. “I should probably stay here just a little bit longer, at least until the doctor tells me to go home.”

  “Doctors don’t know anything,” his mother said. I thought I heard some sadness in her voice.

  “Never as much as mothers.”

  “This place makes me tired,” she said.

  “Joe, why don’t you take your grandmother home?”

  “All right,” Joe said with a heavy sigh.

  “You could have at least stayed in a hospital that had an elevator. That wouldn’t have been too fancy.”

  “You carried her up all those stairs?” Romeo said.

  “And it looks like I’ll be carrying her back down.”

  Romeo whistled, long and low. “You should watch your back, son.”

  Chapter Seven

  ROMEO AND I MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN LEGALLY married, but we were joined in the eyes of the law as business partners. We each owned half of the other’s flower shop, both of which were now called “Julie and Romeo’s.” Still, it didn’t exactly stick. Our customers never accepted the new names and flatly refused to use them.

  Even when we talked about the stores, which we did incessantly, we always called his store Romeo’s and we called mine Roseman’s. We always said your store and my store. We didn’t mean anything by it except as a means of differentiating: your store is low on birthday cards; I want to get some of those orchids over at my store. On the books we were profoundly conjoined, and because of that we got better prices on everything from long-stem reds on Valentine’s Day to our accountant’s fees.

  There was also a great fluidity among our staff, because all of our staff now consisted of our children. If Big Tony was running deliveries for Roseman’s, he’d call his brother Alan to see if there wasn’t something that needed to go out at Romeo’s. If Romeo’s got backed up with arrangement orders, Raymond would call Sandy at Roseman’s, and she would go over and lend a hand.

  It was all a delicate balance, making sure that everybody got along and one store wasn’t favored over the other, and Romeo and I sat at the helm of this great ship and charted the course. Calculating the profit margins in walk-ins and deliveries, the small gift items that could be real moneymakers, keeping on top of the distributors to make sure we were getting the very freshest product, the careful business of ordering just the right amount so that no one wound up with a store full of rotting tulips, was what we did. It worked because we made it work.

  But then we stopped going to work, and instead of the world grinding to a halt the way we knew it would, everything moved forward with suspicious ease. Raymond, who had the most seniority and was the only one in his generation who looked at the shops as his career instead of his default source of employment, took over the managerial duties. When Romeo tried to grill him on the phone, Raymond gently blew him off. I stretched out next to Romeo in the bed, and he held the phone between our ears. After all, the stores did belong to both of us.

  “Everything’s fine, Dad. All you need to worry about is getting better.”

  “I AM getting better, and I’m coming back to work soon. I just want to know about the hydrangeas.”

  This wasn’t exactly true. After a little more than two weeks Romeo could sit up and stand, but only for a few minutes. The rest of the time he was still flat on his back, eating Percocet.

  “What’s there to know?” Raymond said. “They’re here, they’re blue, they’re beautiful.”

  “But who’s doing the arrangements? You and Sandy can’t be handling everything yourselves.”

  “We’re okay.”

  “You aren’t letting Tony do the flowers, are you?”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

  A look of real horror passed over Romeo’s face. “Not Alan!”

  “Now you’re just being silly,” Raymond said calmly. He was quiet for a minute, but Romeo didn’t say anything either. Then Raymond sighed, bre
aking the stand-off. “If you have to know, I’m bringing in a designer from New York, someone very chic. She’s only going to work for a week or so, just until you’re back.”

  I panicked. I started to say that we could never afford that, and then Romeo said it for me. “We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Dad, it’s Plummy,” Raymond said.

  “Plummy’s coming home?”

  “She wanted to surprise you, so act surprised. She’s taking some time off to come and see you, so I told her she might as well roll up her sleeves and help out.”

  “Do you really think she can spare the time?” Romeo’s voice seemed small. “She’s so busy now.”

  “Everyone else in the family works in these shops. I don’t see why she can’t.”

  “But it’s Plummy,” Romeo said.

  “Can’t you just pretend like you’re on vacation? Pretend you’re taking a cruise. Pretend that every phone call is ship-to-shore and is costing sixteen dollars a minute.”

  Romeo hung up the phone and turned his head to face me, a new trick he was really getting quite good at. “He doesn’t need me.”

  “He needs you,” I said.

  “I can’t believe Plummy’s coming in to do our flowers.”

  “I know,” I said, leaning my head gently against the side of his shoulder. “That really does defy imagination.”

  Having Plummy Cacciamani do the flowers in your neighborhood flower shop was a little bit like bringing in Meryl Streep to star in the community theater production of Carousel, or hiring Lance Armstrong to teach your kid how to ride a bike. It was overkill.

  At twenty-four, she was the youngest Cacciamani by many years and bore an eerie resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, with her enormous brown eyes and a neck like a willow branch. She had taken her degree in fine arts to New York City and within a year established herself as a floral artist. Not a florist, mind you. A Floral Artist. None of this calling up and ordering flowers nonsense.

  People scheduled appointments with Plummy six months in advance. They booked their weddings and banquets and rooftop soirees around her packed calendar. They rushed her to the Hamptons and flew her to L.A. to consult about blossoms and twigs.